


if that's all you had to give

by kafkian



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hallucinations, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pining, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 01:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5146067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkian/pseuds/kafkian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Mizumono. Will still builds a boat, but it’s not Abigail he spends all his time hallucinating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if that's all you had to give

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I can’t emphasize how little I know about boats.

They let Will out of the hospital on a Tuesday.

It’s grey, overcast. He doesn’t have a car, or clothes, or anything. There’s no one to see him out or drive him home, because everyone he knows is still in the hospital, dead, or on the run from the FBI.

Will gets a cab home. He stands in front of his house, staring at the clear lines of it against the grim sky, and waits to feel something. There’s a worrying gap in his chest where at the very least there used to be fear. It’s hard to be afraid when the worst has already happened, and it’s already happened to him more than once.

He walks slowly and painfully up the steps and inside, lets the door fall closed behind him with a clatter.

\---

He wakes up in the morning and makes coffee. It seeps dark and bitter down his throat and he imagines it spilling out the hole Hannibal made in his stomach, running down over his fingers like blood.

The dogs mill around his ankles, whining. He doesn’t feel like they were here, yesterday. He must have opened the door, greeted them, made up the bed and changed clothes and slept. He knows he must have.

He goes outside and sits on the porch and waits. He always knew, no matter how it fell out, that when this ended with Hannibal it would fall on him like a ton of bricks. Those last few weeks trying to juggle him and Jack in synchrony had been an exercise in trying to prepare for that pain, with absolutely no success. Hannibal had dug so deep inside him Will felt like there was no hope of cutting him out, but maybe he’d just taken that with him instead, along with all the other parts that made Will human.

Will thinks about defence mechanisms, walls falling down as fast as he can build them up. He thinks about never seeing Hannibal again, and when he comes to he’s throwing up in the sink, acid eating into his throat. He watches his own face blink slowly in the mirror, dizzy with the effort of lifting his head.

\---

He doesn’t answer the phone and eventually, it stops ringing.

He spends a lot of time in his shed, collecting all the pieces together. He doesn’t do it purpose, just starts one day and when he looks up he’s built half a boat. He feels like a cartoon character who can’t keep track of their own limbs, one arm reaching round to tap himself on the shoulder, occasionally looking up to find stars circling his aching head.

What would he even say, if Hannibal was here? He thinks about it sometimes, in between naps and mealtimes and his fingers reaching down without his permission to trace the line of his scar, and he thinks he’d probably say sorry.

He lets his fingers drift along the cool metal angles of the boat motor. He feels disconnected from physical objects in every moment except for when he is working on the boat, as if building the mechanism that will lead him back to Hannibal is the only way to stay anchored to the material world. Without it he thinks he’d drift away entirely.

If Hannibal were here, Will doesn’t think he’d be able to unlatch his hands. He’d claw his way deep into Hannibal’s chest and hook around his heart, hold it beating and wet and warm in hands for as long as it took to reassure himself it was real.

\---

The wooden floor of the shed is damp and cold, seeping through Will’s jeans. He shivers. If Hannibal were here, he’d be complaining about damp marks on his slacks. He wouldn’t sit down on the floor for anyone but he’d do it if Will asked.

‘Would it be so difficult to bring in a chair?’ asks a patient voice next to him.

Will closes his eyes.

‘You’re not here,’ he says softly. ‘You’re not real.’

‘That’s never stopped you before.’

Will takes a small jerky breath and looks quickly, unable to help himself.

Hannibal is sitting next to him, knees folded carefully under him, wearing the camel coloured sweater Will likes. His hair is loose, strands falling over his forehead. Will stares, not breathing.

‘I miss you,’ he says, and it hurts as it comes out.

‘Like drawing a thorn out of a wound,’ Hannibal says, smiling at him.

Will breathes out and frowns, looking down. Hannibal reaches out and tilts his chin up with one finger.

‘I apologise,’ he says. His eyes are kind. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’

‘Do you miss me?’ Will bites out.

‘More than I thought possible,’ Hannibal says. Will tries to look away again but Hannibal won’t let him, keeps his chin caught in a firm grasp. Will glares at him, half in tears and gasping, a fish on the end of an inconceivably long line.

‘Do you believe I am not sorry? Look at me, Will,’ Hannibal demands, leaning forward until their foreheads nearly touch and Will can’t see anything, can’t hear or feel or smell anything but Hannibal, a fucking piece of work even as a phantasm.

‘You’re not even here.’

‘I am more real to you than anything you can touch. Can you deny it?’

‘This isn’t fucking Shakespeare, Hannibal –’

‘Always cursing,’ Hannibal says, breathing out a laugh. His hand slips to clasp around Will’s neck, thumb caressing his jawline. ‘My Will.’

‘Please,’ Will says, like it’s being torn out of him, like he has any idea what he’s asking for, and Hannibal kisses him.

It’s a hard kiss and Hannibal’s lips are hot in the cold, sensation blooming in Will’s numb lips at the touch. His hands scrabble for a moment before they fix on the front of Hannibal’s sweater and haul him closer, his mouth opening with a gasp. Hannibal’s tongue feels obscenely wet and hot, and Will thinks for a minute about all the other human body parts that tongue has touched and feels a little high, hiccupping out a hysterical laugh into Hannibal’s mouth. Hannibal doesn’t even stop, just grabs hold of his bicep and pulls as if they can possibly get any closer.

‘How do I know I’m not just feeling what you’re feeling?’ Will breathes out when they part. ‘I can’t tell with you, I –’

Hannibal kisses him again quickly, his face blank in the way that Will has come to realise means he has nothing else left in his roster of human expressions. Will had come to relish those moments, the feeling of having surprised Hannibal right out of his person suit, just for a second. And now his subconscious is fucking using it against him.

Not real, not real. He squeeze his eyes shut, kisses Hannibal back, opens his mouth to him. There’s no chance this will make anything hurt less, but maybe it can feel good, maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything else, just one God damn time.

‘You don’t,’ Hannibal says against his lips. ‘And seeing as I am you, that would seem to be a fairly safe bet.’

When Will opens his eyes, Hannibal is gone.

\---

It’s always been easy for Will to be in love, as it’s been easy for him to be in anything so long as that anything came packaged neatly inside someone else’s head. As easy as anything else to shake off, too. Usually.

He stays crouched in the shed in the same position until it’s cold enough that it hurts to touch the wrench he was using before Hannibal had appeared. His knees creak when he stands and his hands look pale and spectral in the dark.

He goes inside and makes a fire and sits staring blankly at the trembling flames while his dogs try to take darting licks of the coffee in his half-frozen hands.

It doesn’t help to think about it, but he can’t think of anything else. He’d already known when Hannibal was stabbing him in the stomach that the violence itself wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference, but it’s another thing altogether for the evidence of that to pop up and start making out with him.

‘Probably stalking your next victim right about now,’ he mutters the next day, on his back under the boat, his fingers greasy and cold with engine oil. ‘Probably skinning every rude croissant hawker in France.’

‘I prefer Italy,’ Hannibal’s voice says, and Will hits his head on the hull.

‘What the fuck,’ he says blankly.

‘Language.’

‘What are you going to do, stab me,’ Will mutters, getting out from under the boat, wiping his hands on his jeans. He doesn’t look up at the shape of Hannibal in the doorway, eyes skittering instead across the tools and rags littered across the floor. He feels suddenly aware of the rip in the hem of the shirt he’s wearing, the fact that he didn’t shower this morning. He feels like a girl on prom night; he should’ve bought a corsage in case Hannibal showed up again. ‘Anyway, you liked it yesterday.’

‘It can be stimulating, in certain circumstances.’

That way madness lies, Will thinks, and goes with a marginally safer option.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘What do you think I am doing here?’

‘This isn’t therapy, he says. We’re just having conversations, he says. Can’t answer a straight question, not even when I’m hallucinating you.’

‘Is it a straight question?’

There’s a smirk in his voice and Will looks up before he can stop himself. Hannibal’s eyes are bright and amused, and Will’s caught again, wriggling on that hook. He doesn’t know where this has come from; none of his interactions with Hannibal in the last few months could be read as Hannibal having the upper hand, but maybe Will subconsciously feels like he deserves it. He had a nightmare three days ago about the look on Hannibal’s face when he’d cupped Will’s face, both of them bloody in Hannibal’s kitchen. When he woke up all he could think about was what he’d do to avoid seeing Hannibal in that much pain again.

Of course, he has just as many nightmares about putting that look back on Hannibal’s face.

‘I haven’t seen anyone since I left the hospital,’ he volunteers after the silence gets too long and loud. ‘No one I haven’t dreamed up, anyway.’

‘Many people begin talking to themselves if left without human contact for a prolonged period of time.’

‘Most people don’t hallucinate bodies to go along with that.’

‘Shall we have another conversation about how you are not most people, Will? Or would you prefer to kiss me again?’

‘What I prefer isn’t really the pressing issue.’

‘Then what is? What you prefer must necessarily be what I prefer, and –’

‘Are you just me? Or are you the Hannibal part of me?’ Will asks, the thought jarring his brain out of the constant feedback loop of Hannibal saying ‘Would you prefer to kiss me again?’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘There’s a line, if a very thin one. I think it’s made of dog hair.’

Hannibal smiles, wide. He steps a little closer and Will gets an instant sense memory of them circling each other in Hannibal’s office before everything went to shit, Will fleeing like a twitchy animal every time Hannibal got a little too close. It had been subtle enough that Will hadn’t really understood it then; why seeing Hannibal felt so good and so painful at once, like Hannibal was flaying him slowly and inscribing poetry on the flesh underneath.

He shakes his head to try and clear it. Thinking in metaphors is always a bad sign, especially around Hannibal, who eats them for breakfast when he’s not busy eating human flesh.

‘It doesn’t pay to be all doom and gloom, Will,’ Hannibal says gently, close enough now that he could touch if he wanted to. If Will wanted to.

‘You _are_ my doom and gloom,’ Will says, scrubbing a hand over his face. ‘And you can talk, Mr. Drama Queen. What’s it like in your head these days anyway? All sunshine and roses now you got what you want?’

Hannibal frowns.

‘In what possible version of events did I get what I want?’

‘You got to kill me,’ Will says, hands going automatically to the bandaged place under his sweater. He jerks them back angrily when he realises.

‘Not what I wanted.’ Hannibal’s voice is tight. Will is carefully avoiding his eye, a habit he hasn’t had to fall back on in months. There had been nothing in his eyes for Hannibal to run from; every threat and snipe only drew him closer, until Will had forgotten why he’d been sniping in the first place. ‘You know what I want, Will.’

‘Go away,’ Will says loudly, shutting his eyes, thinking of fairy tales. _Speak of the devil and he shall appear – I do believe in fairies, I do, I do, I do – say his name three times in the mirror and he’ll visit you –_

Hannibal is obediently silent for long enough that Will is obliged to open his eyes a crack and check he’s still there. His teeth glint like glass in the dark when he speaks.

‘If I had meant to kill you, Will, you would be dead.’

‘You wanted to haunt me,’ Will says miserably. ‘Is that what this is?’

‘If you want it to be.’

Hannibal draws closer again, until he can’t help but invade Will’s space. Wrong; Hannibal wouldn’t want to help that. Will had always liked the slow, deliberate cadence of Hannibal’s movements; he wouldn’t be moved unless and until he wanted to be. It had been another solid thing for Will to cling to.

Any port in a storm.

‘I can do things ghosts can’t do,’ Hannibal says, reaching for him. His hands lock around Will’s hips and Will steps backward on reflex, and back and back until he hits the wall with a hitch of breath, Hannibal following him with every step. His eyes are hypnotic and relentlessly dark. Will feels something welling up in his throat, a lump he has to swallow around again and again.

Hannibal’s fingers pulling up Will’s sweater, shirt, drifting cold and light down his stomach. They brush over the bandage and linger, tracing the edges before moving on.

‘I wish I could take this off without risking your health,’ Hannibal murmurs. ‘I would kiss your stitches.’

‘You would not,’ Will says, more a defiance than an expression of disbelief. Hannibal definitely would do that, given half the chance. Probably before he ripped them out with his teeth.

‘If I was real,’ Hannibal says, ‘what would you want me to do?’

‘Nothing,’ Will says harshly. ‘I’d want you to stop – stop touching me. Stop talking, stop _everything._ ’ His hand snaps down like a handcuff over Hannibal’s wrist, halting its movement downwards.

Hannibal smirks and Will sees him outside the cell in BSHCI, known at last, the devil in the details. He leans in close, breath drifting over Will’s neck.

‘Will, you forget I always find you out when you are lying. Especially like this.’

Will shivers. Hannibal’s hand starts moving again and Will keeps his grip on Hannibal’s wrist, feels the bones grinding together under the skin.

‘Don’t,’ he says softly. Hannibal kisses his neck, hand reaching the waistband of Will’s pants and slipping beneath them.

‘Why?’

Will hisses at the first touch of Hannibal’s hand on his cock, soothing and stirring at once. It’s not – if it’s just him, what harm is there, really?

The thought rattles around in his head like a penny in an empty jar, desperate and clattering.

‘Not good at getting the things you want, are you, Will? I kept trying to give them to you, but you wouldn’t take them.’

‘The things I want would get me locked up again,’ Will mutters, arching into Hannibal’s hand, already slick and wet despite the cold. It’s like being jerked off by the Grim Reaper. He has no idea why he’s still hard.

‘Not with me,’ Hannibal says, and bites his neck hard enough to bruise, jerks him fast and hard, until Will is biting his lip against helpless noises and coming in a rush, sagging against the wall.

When he opens his eyes Hannibal is watching him closely, a stark and hungry look on his face. Will flaps a hand at him.

‘Dial it back, Cujo.’

‘You are beautiful, Will. In the intellectual sense, of course, but also the aesthetic. I do not believe I will ever come close to looking my fill.’

‘More convincing all the time,’ Will mutters, scrubbing a hand across his eyes. A few mutinous tears catch on his fingertips. ‘I could almost believe in you, if I wasn’t pretty sure you were in Europe. I never really understood what the hell you were doing in Baltimore.’

‘Oh, many merry kinds,’ Hannibal smiles. ‘Of hell,’ he clarifies when Will just looks at him blankly.

Hannibal kisses him. His lips are the only part of him that is warm.

\---

Hannibal doesn’t appear the next day.

Will spends hours rattling around in the shed under the boat, his mind a wide blank space with Hannibal crowding in at the edges. Every time Will turns around he expects to see him, and every time he doesn’t he gets progressively angrier with himself.

He stomps inside the house after wasting most of the day in fruitless labour. The dogs whine for food and attention and he wants to snap his jaws at them for it, and is then completely horrified at himself for the impulse. He braces his hands on the counter as he waits for coffee to brew.

 _This is bad for me_ , he thinks, feels the ghosts of the syllables in his mouth. He remembers the look on Jack’s face, how willing he was to throw Will to the wolves in his own mind if they could just save one more, another few, everyone.

It’s good that Hannibal is gone, Will thinks stubbornly. It’s _good_.

‘Long day?’

Will’s hands go rigid on the counter.

‘Jesus, Hannibal.’

‘Not unlike,’ Hannibal agrees, amused. ‘I commit a sacrifice and disappear, only to return spectral and elusive, and provoke my dearest disciple into questioning himself.’

‘I’d hardly call myself your disciple, let alone the dearest.’

‘I would. Or perhaps that is a little condescending. You are less a disciple than a partner, but you are certainly dearest.’

Will sets his jaw and turns around. Hannibal is smiling, his eyes bright like they always were when he opened the door for their appointments, just the anticipation of seeing Will making him shine under the skin. He holds out a hand, and everything that has been holding Will upright today gives way, with an almost audible sigh.

He takes Hannibal’s hand and lets himself be pulled in, Hannibal’s arms winding around him like vines. He doesn’t know why this is so easy; they’d barely touched before, in their old life. He closes his eyes.

‘I thought you wouldn’t come in the house,’ he says, his voice half muffled by Hannibal’s sweater. He smells like snow and smoke. His chest doesn’t move under Will’s cheek.

‘I come whenever and wherever I am called.’

‘Lies. I keep telling you to go away.’

‘Once,’ Hannibal corrects. ‘You told me to go away once.’

‘I meant it,’ Will sighs. ‘I did.’

‘I know,’ Hannibal soothes, stroking through Will’s curls. ‘I know.’

\---

‘Tell me, tell me,’ Will chants, throwing his head back on the pillow. Hannibal’s three fingers deep inside him, slick and cool for Will to rock down onto, and every time Will opens his eyes to look Hannibal is looming over him, baring his teeth like he wants nothing more than to bite.

‘What should I tell you?’

‘You fucking know what, don’t be an asshole.’

Hannibal laughs, crooks his fingers and Will swears, his spine arching off the mattress.

‘I love you,’ Hannibal says, and Will comes.

\---

The dogs don’t react to the space Hannibal fills up, but they do react to Will when he talks to Hannibal. They go whining and nervous, tails wagging anxiously. Will tries to think about it as little as possible.

‘They don’t like me,’ Hannibal says, reclining on Will’s bed completely naked, one knee bent and foot resting flat against the mattress.

Will’s gaze drifts across him for a moment before he remembers to yank it away, turning his back on Hannibal and sitting on the edge of the bed to pull on jeans and a t shirt.

Hannibal laughs.

‘ _You_ don’t like me.’

‘And yet,’ Will mutters, throwing a glance over his shoulder before he drops his face in his hands. On the scale of one to crazy, having sex with your own hallucination has to be up there next to entrapping your serial killing cannibalistic best friend into committing murder. This is all probably fairly conclusive evidence that Will has no one but himself to blame for the shitshow his life has become, if even removing the immediate source of drama doesn’t snap it back into a normal shape. Hannibal is the non-existent raccoon in his chimney, the wounded animal that disappears by the time Will gets outside.

‘I feel like I’m using you,’ Will complains.

Hannibal makes a tsking noise.

‘I am here to be used,’ he says, getting up to rest his chin on Will’s shoulder. He doesn’t breathe, sometimes. Will has a number of grievances to discuss with his imagination and that is only one of them.  

‘I know,’ Will says, swallowing. ‘You don’t need to tell me how stupid it is.’

‘I don’t need to tell you any number of things, it seems. You are a veritable goldmine of knowledge.’

‘About myself, maybe. I still think my impression of you could do with work. You haven’t been comparing me to nearly enough works of art.’

‘Data, data, I cannot make bricks without clay,’ Hannibal says, his voice light. He nuzzles into Will’s neck, breathing again, one hand sneaking up to wrap around Will’s waist under his shirt. His fingertips brush against Will’s navel and Will shivers, nerves springing to life like flowering bulbs in May.

\---

Ice crystals creep up the windows, further with each shortening day. Hannibal never wears a coat, no matter how cold it gets. He bites and bites until Will’s skin is peppered with a repeating pattern of teeth marks, but when Will wakes up in the morning they’re always gone.

‘You will be finished soon,’ Hannibal observes, picking a non-existent piece of lint off his sweater, sitting down on the chair Will brought out for him a few days ago. Hannibal had smiled at him so wide that it made Will’s chest ache.

‘Not if you keep distracting me,’ Will says, and then sits back on his heels. ‘Is that what this is about? I’m scared of going, scared of finding you, so – so I’m trying to distract myself?’

‘That seems counterintuitive. I am who you wish to see more than anyone else in the world, and so you do. Rarely has your imagination obliged you so, Will. Be thankful it is I you see, and not any of your other killers.’

‘I probably wouldn’t be fucking any of them,’ Will says absently.

Hannibal sighs.

‘Call it an unorthodox form of therapy, if you must call it anything,’ he says. ‘I only want you to reach your full potential.’

‘Now that _is_ in-character,’ Will says, holding his glasses up to the light and polishing them on his sweater, probably more violently than is necessary. ‘Well played, Doctor Lecter. Five star material. Did you come up with that one yourself?’

\---

‘It’s because I want to be here,’ Hannibal says later, watching Will’s face as he drops kisses one by one down the path of Will’s thighs. They’re feather light, a breath of wind that makes Will shiver. ‘Is that what you want me to tell you? Across the world, having evaded capture, beautiful companion at my side, I still want you so much I’ve dreamed up another body, another mind for you to play with –’

‘Stop,’ Will says, ‘stop, I don’t –’

He stares up at the ceiling.

‘You don’t need me to what?’

‘I don’t need you to lie.’

\---

Hannibal’s right. The boat gets finished.

It happens in between one moment and the next, one last tightened screw and it’s suddenly, irrevocably done. Will puts his tools down and stares at it for a while, unsure what to do with his hands.

Hannibal is sat on the couch when he goes inside, as he is wont to be when Will comes in from the cold these days. His feet are propped up on Will’s coffee table and Will has another of those bizarre moments of dislocation before he remembers that this is _his_ Hannibal, who is in a lot of ways more human than the real thing.

He listens but he can’t hear the sound of Hannibal breathing.

He takes off his shoes and drops them loudly on the floor before he goes over and sits down next to Hannibal, who immediately grabs his hand and blows on it. Will stares at his unbuttoned shirt collar, the triangle of exposed skin. There’s no fire in the grate.

‘I wish you would wear gloves,’ Hannibal says.

Will yanks his hand back and goes to build a fire, feeling Hannibal’s gaze grazing over his back.

When he sits back down again he leans forward and kisses Hannibal’s cheek softly. He’ll have to call a moving van later, when Hannibal is gone, and arrange for someone to take care of the dogs. The boat isn’t going to sail itself.

He keeps thinking there has to be a limit on this thing, that eventually whatever fucked up part of his brain needs Hannibal more than it needs a functioning psyche is just going to bow out in some big, dramatic, irrevocable kind of way. How many times can he keep losing the same person before it stops hurting so much?

Hannibal shifts, tries to turn and kiss him properly but Will pulls back, ducking his head into Hannibal’s neck. Apparently there’s room for at least one more.

‘Can we not,’ he says, and then winces at how it sounds. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, I just – can we just sit?’

Hannibal hesitates and Will braces himself for an argument, something crumpling inside his chest. But then Hannibal just nods slowly and his arms loop around Will, a comfortable weight.

They sit like that for a long time, until the fire burns down and the dogs are sleeping mounds all around them. Hannibal’s hand sweeps a slow curve across Will’s back and Will squeezes his eyes shut hard.

\---

The sea breeze feels so good against his skin he almost wants to smile. Mostly he just turns his face into it and lets it scour him.

He’s sat next to the boat, staring blankly at his hands, when a faint touch reaches out and brushes the water carefully from his eyes.

‘What is all this, now,’ Hannibal says.

‘The wind,’ Will says, looking up at him, a lump rising in his throat. He feels absurdly as if he’s being confronted by a jilted ex. ‘I didn’t think you’d –’

‘I would follow you anywhere, Will.’

‘Please don’t,’ Will says, closing his eyes. ‘I can’t – I –’

‘It is alright. One of me is quite enough for one continent, I believe,’ Hannibal says, and it’s almost a question, so unsure Will wants to squirm away from it. ‘I will remain when you depart.’

‘This is so stupid,’ Will says, grabbing Hannibal’s hand and yanking it to his mouth to kiss. His skin tastes like salt, like the sea. Hannibal breathes out harshly, a puff of cold air even in the light of day. ‘I’m going out to find you when I already have you.’

‘You will always have me,’ Hannibal says. His smile is warm and sad at once, and there’s nothing behind his eyes, nothing but dead air. Nobody home. Will knows this; his delusions are convincing but they are, after all, still delusions.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and gets in the boat.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are much appreciated!


End file.
